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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS
CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency.
MS scorns the defection...
This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"
In my opinion, Open Office still has many issues which need to be fixed in future releases to compete with MS Office. I don't know whether that was taken into consideration in this move, but certainly a step in the right direction for open source.
A blog like any other.
I'm reminded of when a large australian company changed to an OSS desktop solution, and MS decried this as "a blow for choice in the market". No explanation of how this could be possible, but everything is sound bites, a mere snippet of text that cannot possibly convey any real meaning of a situation.
... agency has selected an immature and unproven software package" could well be applied to anyone looking towards Longhorn.
"The
Few will make that leap of judgment to understand the hypocrisy.
RST
when the little pebbles start to hit microsofts bank accounts then ill agree, untill then microsoft will do the same old thing. You have to understand, to most people windows is what a computer is, they have no intrest in changing.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Huh? OOo has quite a number of features that AbiWord lacks. And some of them will be important to large users.
AbiWord is fine for simpler documents though.
I *do* agree that Gnumeric is great, and it's prettier than OOo Calc.
Microsoft's attitude speaks volumes here as well
Glad someone else saw that, too. Earth to Redmond: In addition to being obnoxious, the "tight fisted" comment can be read as an anti-Semitic slur.
So MS has painted themselves into a corner, and now they're kernel-panicking. They can't support Linux or BSD for business reasons, the Mac is a *nix box now too so it's out of the picture for them, and they've already pre-announced that their next Windows version can potentially, via DRM and copyrighted file formats, usurp the document owners' rights to their data. Why would one of world's most security-conscious states go for a deal that locks them into the world's least security-conscious software company?
"Buy it or we'll call you names" isn't going to cut it as a response. And for some reason, I don't think you need "advanced enterprise features" to crank out form letters that read: "Dear [applicant]: Thank you for your interest in..." even if it they do read from right to left.
Gotta give MS the Darl McBride Brass Balls Award though. It takes a lot of nerve for a company that can't even suffer the possibility of a hypothetical competitor cutting into its revenues in the future, to call someone else "tight-fisted" for not reaching into his pocket for cold cash right now, just to buy the privilege of paying again and again any time MS decides to "increase shareholder value."
And then there's the delicious irony of IBM and free software being the spoilers. [theatrical-trailer-voice] Twenty years ago, he stole their operating systems, (clip) and plunged the world into reboots (clip), incompatibilities (clip), and perpetual upgrades (pause). Now, they're back - with a vengeance! (30-sec. action clip sequence to dark screen. Cue titles) Desktop Wars II: IBM returns. Now playing in Israel and the West Bank. In theaters worldwide next Summer. This feature has not yet been understood by the Software Association of America.[/theatrical-trailer-voice]
If opening a document makes you a criminal, then I say the sooner the better, then the general populace might understand that having corporations like MS run your government isn't a good thing.
It's just as likely people will ditch MSOffice than OO. In fact more so - who will want to work with a package that can't save files you can open anywhere else (even on a non-fritz PC which will be the vast majority for many years to come - there are *zero* fritz chips in circulation at the moment). No company is going to use Word if they deal with Europe, asia, in fact anywhere else but the US, because their documents would be unreadable.
OTOH I can't see MS committing that kind of suicide. They're not *that* stupid.
Might it have something to do with the land that they were given was at the time brittish territory? Or the fact that their ancestors had lived in that area for as long as the palestinians? Originaly they had a very small section of land, given to them by the brittish government. Then 6 other nations decided they didn't like that and invaded. Israel beat them back and in the process captured territories (a convention of warfare, any land captured is yours) and now the paletinians are pissed because they have less land. Lesson to the palestinians, if you want to keep your land, don't go starting wars you can't win.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Actually Office 2K debugged most of the features of Office 97. By the same token, Office 2k3 should debug all of them and some of the new features introduced with Office 2K.
I agree with your mother. I updated much earlier but that was because O97 wasn't stable with larger documents or embedded objects. However, I now stick with O2K on my remaining Windows system.
See my journal, I write things there
The Jewish people were sent into exile 2000 years ago, and yet they survived the Inquisition, pogroms, WWII, Stalin, etc. and always aspired to return to their land.
It's really dangerous to assume its reasonable to pick the time when your chosen nation was at its largest extent and assume you get to put the clock back.
One could just as reasonably say that they were once part of the Babylon empire, and therefore should be part of modern Iraq. Or under the Romans, so should be part of Italy.
These mythic religious fantasies are really damaging - witness the crusades.
There aren't any good, simple solutions to these problem. Several people have reasonable claims to the territory, and they need to work towards a reasonable solution.